Innovationsguiden (translation: innovation guide) won the Professional Non-Profit / Public Sector service design award. Innovationguiden is an ongoing project that aims to support and reinvigorate the Swedish public sector through service design in collaboration with citizens. By providing various forms of support to municipalities, county councils and regions, they encourage them to develop towards user-centricity and innovation.

﻿These 3 people are featured in the interview:

Sara Tunheden: Project Leader at Innovationsguiden at the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SALAR)

Gunilla Gudmunds: City of Gothenburg

Julia Olander: City of Gothenburg

Most surprising insight

The team of Innovationguiden consist of 3 people, they are backed up by a network of 55 coaches. Together they implemented a ‘train the trainer’ principle, which had a huge impact on the whole governmental organisation. This resulted in a reach of 2800 people now working in a different and improved way. It was inspiring to hear the huge impact they made which such a small team.

What we learned

This interview emphasised the importance of the use of templates in service design trainings. As being service designers ourselves, we’re often not fond of working with standard templates. We believe in tailoring methods and tools to solve the problem we’re faced with. But when you are training people in new methods that will change their way of working they need to get to know the new tools. They have to familiarise themselves with the standard templates in order to become confident enough to invent new variations. Therefor delivering standard templates and encouraging people to use them is a very important step to get them on board.